Below is a list of all
courses and conferences with their descriptions. Clicking on Handouts takes to
a page with all available hand outs.

Lecturer:
Artemis Alexiadou

Course Title:
(Anti-)causative alternations

Course Description: The cross-linguistic study of the causative-anticausative alternation
provides us with at least two important empirical observations:

I) While
the core of verbs that undergo the causative alternation is stable across
languages, there is also interesting variation. For instance,
anti-causativization seems to be a restricted process in languages like
English, while others, e.g. Greek and Hindi freely form anticausatives.
Moreover, the reverse pattern is also found, e.g. causatives of verbs of
appearance are possible in Japanese but not in English.

II) Languages show
substantial variation in the morphological marking of the alternation (see
Haspelmath 1993): in many languages the anticausative and not the causative
variant of the alternation is marked by special
morphology, other languages mark the causative variant of the alternation and
there are also languages with non-directed alternations. In this course, we
will deal with the above issues by adopting a non-derivational approach to the
alternation. According to this, change of state verbs are generally decomposed
into at least three layers of structure, a Voice, an eventive v component and a
Root-phrase. We will first provide evidence for this decomposition. We will
then address the question to what extent systematic patterns can be found
across languages, how they correlate with the specific syntactic structures
available for the alternation, how they are derived and what the relevant
parametric options are that lead to the diverse empirical picture found..

Lecture Title: Striatum and language: the model of Huntington's disease

In the last 20 years, the
role of subcortical structures in brain functioning has become a major field of
research. In particular the role of the striatum in executive functions
(attention, planning, and working memory) is becoming increasingly understood.
However, despite the advent of new brain imaging techniques, its role in
language remains a controversial and an unresolved issue, presumably because of
technical limitations and because animal models cannot be of any help. Evidence
in humans come from language impairments reported for vascular subcortical
damage and for neurodegenerative diseases of the basal ganglia, such as
Huntington’s disease (HD), which primary targets the striatum at the early
stages. Impairments observed in these studies encompass a large range of
deficits from various aphasic profiles to isolated dysarthria, disorganisation
of semantic knowledge in vascular disorders, or syntactic impairments in HD.
Most of these observations are not driven by specific hypotheses on language
processing and do not allow one to understand the specific role of the striatum
in the broader frame of the language processing. In contrast studies conducted
by Ullman 1997 suggest that patients suffering from HD are specifically
impaired in syntax processing, which in turn suggest that syntax processing is
located in a fronto-striatal circuit. However, although some rules (like
morphological conjugation rules or syntactic movement rules) are impaired, canonical
structure or pragmatic strategy remain spared
(Teichamnn et al., 2005). Thus, studying these patients allow to disentangle
various theories of language and their link with other cognitive function like
memory or executive functions. Thus, the characterisation of the language
disorders accompanying striatal dysfunction and its neural basis, which may
reflect either subcortical damage or concomitant cortical dysfunction,
constitutes a major challenge for the understanding of language processing.

This lecture will present
the state of the art in this line of investigation, some ongoing research and
some speculations regarding what it shows regarding the neural substrates of
the language faculty.

Prerequisites: none

Lecturer: Emmanuel Dupoux

Lecture Title: Levels of Organization in Spoken Language: Evidence from Perception
and Learning

Spoken language is a
communication system of unparalleled complexity in the animal world. We will
examine some phonological and phonetic aspects of this complexity, particularly
from the point of view of perception and learning. We will survey the main
theoretical models of speech recognition and language acquisition and confront
them to recent results regarding language learning by infants and monolingual
adults.

Prerequisites: none

Lecturer: Hilda Koopman

Course Title:
Noun/Verb Asymmetries

Asymmetries between Ns
and Vs (no raising to subject or raising to object
within NPs, for example) have played an important role in the development of
syntactic theory, cf. e.g. Chomsky, 1970) and are well documented. Yet these
asymmetries remain largely unexplained. In these lectures, we will catalog
these asymmetries, discuss some classic proposals in the literature to derive
them (e.g. Kayne 1984’s unambiguous paths approach, or Chomsky’s 1986 theory of
inherent case, (1986)), and explore if and how these asymmetries can be made to
follow given the recent developments in our understanding of syntactic
structures and what drives them.

Course Description: The conceptual necessity of distinguishing among temporal location,
aspect and the Aktionsart of eventuality descriptions expressed by a verb and
its arguments is nowadays generally accepted. It goes hand in hand with the
idea of a compositional order, in which aspect first operates on eventuality
descriptions with a given temporal profile and the resulting configurations are
then directly or indirectly temporally located with respect to Utterance Time.
This compositional order can be syntactically implemented in different
fashions, which nonetheless share the general configuration given in (1):

(1) [Temporal Location
[Aspect [Eventuality Description]]]

The intermediate position
occupied by Aspect in this configuration correlates with a dual possibility for
conceptualizing the category. Approaches emphasizing the impact of aspect on
eventuality descriptions have given rise to a family of theories according to
which aspect modifies or otherwise determines the temporal structure of an
eventuality. Approaches emphasizing what aspect and temporal location have in
common give rise to theories in which aspect is modeled as a secondary,
non-deictic temporal relation. The first conception has been dominant in the
formal semantics tradition, as well as in some syntactic approaches. The second
conception does not actually deny the existence of aspect qua eventuality
modification, but pleads for a distinction between this range of phenomena and
aspect in a narrow sense, which is conceptualized as a relation between an
eventuality (or rather, its temporal trace) and a distinguished "interval
of visibility" . This course will be devoted to
discussing the formal implementations of these alternative approaches, mainly on
the basis of material from the Romance languages and from English.

Course Description: The class will explore the relationship between the theory of
Morphology, as developed in Distributed Morphology, and the architecture of
grammar, as developed within the Minimalist Program. The first meeting will
discuss the basic assumptions of Distributed Morphology (DM). In the second,
Blocking will be examined, with the goal of demonstrating that competition in
grammatical derivations is limited to the competition between Vocabulary Items
for insertion, at the phonological interface, into the terminal nodes from the
syntax. The third class will connect the locality domains for morphosemantic
and morphophonological interactions to the phases of the Minimalist Program.
Finally, the last class will discuss argument structure/morphology interactions,
as revealed through an analysis of re- prefixation and stative passives in
English.

Prequisites: The class is
pitched at the level of a second year graduate student in the US, although any student
having taken a general linguistics course plus a semester of generative
syntax should be able to follow what's going on.

References:

Halle, Morris and Alec Marantz 1993. "Distributed Morphology and the pieces of
inflection," in K.Hale and J. Keyser, eds. The View from Building 20. pp. 111-176. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Course Description: This course explores the empirical motivations for positing abstract,
unpronounced syntax through a close examination of elliptical structures in a
variety of languages. I begin by reviewing the nature of the identity condition
that holds between an elided phrase and its antecedent, arguing that at least
part of this condition must be stated over articulated syntactic structures,
based on recently discovered differences between VP-ellipsis and sluicing.
Sluicing then forms the basis for a detailed look at the nature of wh-movement
and islands, where the latter are argued to be PF-phenomena. Differential
island sensitivity in VP-ellipsis, sluicing, and fragment answers is examined,
and a typology of the range of 'island repair' effects is developed. Finally,
the results of these investigations are applied to a series of puzzles from the
domain of ellipsis in comparatives, including attributive comparatives, pseudogapping,
and phrasal comparatives.

Prerequisites: a general
knowledge of syntactic theory.

References: Full
references will be on the handouts, but for anyone eager to get a head start, these
papers and handouts will provide a good rough guide to the daily content.

Course Description: These lectures will discuss the way the lexical semantics of
perception verbs (see, look, hear, listen, feel,..;
voir, regarder, entendre, écouter, sentir,..) interacts with their
complementation properties. Specifically, the semantic types of the complements
(concrete entity, event, fact, proposition, ...) will
be examined, in correlation with the different types of meanings that
perception verbs can take (strict perception, understanding, opinion,
appearance, ...) and with the syntactic categories of the complements (NP, NP
VP, CP, small clause). Among others, the following topics will be addressed:
(i) the raising versus control status of perception verbs, (ii) individual
level predicates in perception verb complements, (iii) negative complements.
Data will be taken mainly from English and French.

Prerequisites: The
lectures will be accessible to students having a basic knowledge of formal
syntax and semantics.

Course Description: Recent work in syntactic theory has replaced a traditional
Projectionist view of VP according to which the projection of arguments is conditioned
by the thematic properties of verbal predicates and their structural
organisation depends on an universal priciple of theta
assignment hierarchy with a Constructionist approach. This novel line of
research puts forward a hypothesis that verb meanings are built in the
syntactic component of the grammar by means of event templates that contain the
verbal root and functional predicates such as little v, Voice, Applicative,
Cause, Become. The course aims to investigate some central issues concerning
the structure of VP. How are Dative arguments encoded? Are causers and agents
treated alike in transitive templates?. What is the
role of Voice head, Cause head, and APPLICATIVE head in licensing these
arguments? What is the interaction, if any, between the lower Root layer and
upper functional layers in verbal templates ? In order
to fully understand the phenomena at hand a special attention will be paid to
ergative languages in which the agent of transitive clauses bears a special
ergative case.

Prerequisites: An
Introduction to Syntax

Lecturer:
David Poeppel

Course Title:
Cognitive Neuroscience of Language

Course Description: The lectures will cover the nature of the techniques used to
investigate the neural basis of language processing and discuss how these
approaches can (and cannot) be used to learn something about language. The
focus will be, principally, on deficit-lesion correlation (neuropsychology),
magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Examples will be drawn from speech perception (lecture 2), lexical access and
representation (lecture 3), and sentence comprehension (lecture 4).

Prerequisites: No
specific background required.

References: Further
Information will be made available at: Teaching

Lecturer: Luigi Rizzi

Course Title:
Movement and Concepts of Locality

Course Description: Emonds (1970) observed that the core cases of movement preserve
structure, in that they create configurations which can be independently
generated by the fundamental structure building mechanism. The hypothesis that
Move is a subcase of Merge (Internal Merge: Chomsky 2000, etc.) elegantly
expresses structure preservation while reducing the computational operations.
Still, the structures resulting from movement, the chains,
manifest some irreducible peculiarities, first and foremost the fact that they
obey certain locality principles.

In this course I would
like to address the issue of locality in the broader context of the study of
the nature and causes of movement. There are two basic concepts of locality
that are referred to in the linguistic literature:

- Intervention: in … X …
Z … Y … a local relation cannot hold between X and Y across an intervener Z, an
element bearing some structural similarity to the elements involved in the
local relation.

Relativized minimality
(Rizzi 1990) is a principle of the first kind, Phase
Impenetrability (Chomsky 2001, 2005) is of the second kind. There seems to be a
certain division of labor between the two principles: Intervention deals with WeakIslands,
while (Phase) Impenetrability deals with the obligatoriness of
successive-cyclic movement in configurations not involving a visible intervener
(e.g., extraction from declaratives). I would like to discuss these issues in
the course, and explore some possibilities aiming at unifying the two concepts
of locality.

Prerequisites: basic
knowledge of syntactic theory

Lecturer:
Peter Svenonius

Course Title:
The Anatomy of the Category P

Course Description: This is a cross-linguistic investigation into locative and directional
expressions, with a focus on their relationship to adpositions (prepositions
and postpositions, the category P). "Local" case systems like those
of Finnish and Hungarian will be examined, as will languages which make
extensive use of relational nouns to express locative concepts. The aim of the
course will be to develop some sense of the range and limits of
cross-linguistic variation in this domain, with an eye toward characterizing
the nature of universals, whether they are syntactically autonomous or
cognitively grounded.

Prerequisites: A basic
background in descriptive linguistics would be useful. No theoretical
background will be presupposed.